Dropbox acquires Readmill employees, shoring up offering

Dropbox acquires another company

Dropbox has acquired social reading app, Readmill, which will shut down this year after developing a beautiful mobile app for sharing book highlights with your friends. Tech writer Romain Dillet reports that the deal value is around $8 million in stocks and cash, and is truly a talent acquisition to strengthen Dropbox’s core services.

Now, visitors to the Readmill site are met with founders David Kjelkerud and Henrik Berggren’s statement, noting that “it is no longer possible to create an account, and on July 1, 2014, the Readmill app will no longer be available,” and users can export their reading data and download their books.

What this means for both companies moving forward

Dropbox has been on an acquisition spree, and is pulling ahead in the cloud race, strengthening their offering to what is shaping up to be a potential backbone for company communications. Will Dropbox be adding Readmill-esque features to their lineup? In some form, it is possible.

Readmill is shutting down, and despite a pay day and a job that takes the team to San Francisco, the founders’ letter to users is an apology to fans.

“Readmill’s story ends here. Many challenges in the world of ebooks remain unsolved, and we failed to create a sustainable platform for reading. For this, we’re deeply sorry. We considered every option before making the difficult decision to end the product that brought us together.”

Fans may be disappointed, but they should look to Dropbox to see if that disappointment will be short lived or not.

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